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NASA: A Nuclear Reactor To Replace Your Water Heater

This reactor does not use fission, the process of splitting atoms into smaller elements employed by every commercial power reactor currently operating on earth.

And it does not use hot fusion, the union of hydrogen atoms into larger elements that powers the sun and stars.

Instead, a low-energy nuclear reactor (LENR) uses common, stable elements like nickel, carbon, and hydrogen to produce stable products like copper or nitrogen, along with heat and electricity.

“It has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy, cleanly, without hazardous ionizing radiation, without producing nasty waste,” said Joseph Zawodny, a senior research scientist with NASA’s Langley Research Center.

“The easiest implementation of this would be for the home,” he said. “You would have a unit that would replace your water heater. And you would have some sort of cycle to derive electrical energy from that.”

The LENR offers a slow-moving neutron to an element—NASA researchers are working with nickel. The nickel absorbs the extra neutron, rendering the nickel unstable. To regain stability, the acquired neutron splits into an electron and a proton.

“So where it once had an extra neutron, making it an unstable isotope of whatever element it was, it now has an extra proton instead, which makes it a more stable isotope of a different element,” Bob Silberg of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote last week on the agency’s Global Climate Change blog.

“This process releases energy which, hypothetically, can be used to generate electricity.”

With its new proton, the nickel has gained stability as another element: copper.

“There are estimates using just the performance of some of the devices under study that 1 percent of the nickel mined on the planet each year could produce the world’s energy requirements at the order of 25 percent the cost of coal,” according to Dennis Bushnell, the chief scientist at Langley.

Carbon could also be used as a fuel, NASA scientists speculate, and the process would turn the carbon into nitrogen, the most abundant element in the atmosphere.

“I don’t know what could possibly be cleaner than that,” said Zawodny. “You’re not sequestering carbon, you’re totally removing carbon from the system.”

The scientists emphasize that LENR reactors are very different from the fission reactors employed today, which use highly radioactive elements, produce radioactive waste, and occasionally suffer from meltdowns. They also use the term LENR to distinguish these reactors from the chemical cold fusion reactors sought by researchers beginning in the 1980s.

“When we concentrated upon nuclear engineering beginning in the 1940′s we jumped to the strong force/particle physics and leapt over the weak force/condensed matter nuclear physics,” Bushnell said. “We are going back now to study and hopefully develop this arena.”

NASA researchers are leaning on the Widom-Larsen Theory published in 2006 by Boston physicist Allan Widom and Chicago physicist Lewis Larsen, who speculates that low energy nuclear reactions are already happening on earth—in lightning, for example. And according to Larsen, LENR reactions may be responsible for occasional fires in lithium-ion batteries.

Which underscores that even low-energy nuclear reactors can produce dangerous amounts of energy.

“Several labs have blown up studying LENR and windows have melted,” Bushnell writes, “indicating when the conditions are right prodigious amounts of energy can be produced and released.”

[UPDATE: Lewis Larsen responds to this statement in the comments below this post: "Firstly, all such violent energetic events are quite rare — only a handful have ever occurred over the past 20+ years during the course of literally hundreds of thousands of LENR experiments; most have involved water-filled reaction vessels of one kind or another . Secondly, and most importantly, NONE of these incidents were caused by a nuclear explosion per se." See Larsen's full comment on the third page of comments below.]

NASA researchers are working on producing the reactions by vibrating lattices of nickel saturated with hydrogen ions at high frequencies. Right now, those vibrations require more initial energy than the reactions produce, the same problem that has stymied efforts to produce fusion reactors. But Bushnell offers this summary of the state of low-energy nuclear reactors:

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Well, seeing as how it took them 24 years to finally get around to admiting that there might be something going on that they can’t explain in 25 words or less……………………………………………..I’d say that they are right on schedule.

you mean the corrupt journals that schools like Harvard and MIT can’t even afford to publish in anymore because the fees have become so absurd that all they end up doing is obstructing the release of information? No thanks, pal. Everyone should follow in the footsteps of MFMP (http://www.quantumheat.org/) and share all of their data openly to the entire world. They have successfully demonstrated that there is in fact excess heat in their LENR reactions. Then you can look at the Toyota/Mitsubishi experiments which used highly refined non-naturally occurring quantities of specific isotopes as starting material that they then transmuted to completely different elements other than the corresponding non-naturally occurring isotopes. This evidence is extremely hard to refute and can be tested over and over after the event to verify the isotopic content. This for me is the smoking gun that says LENR is completely real.

This message board is totally censored. Only messages that are “called out” are displayed. Messages that are not “called out” are only indicated by a “+expand comment” which is barely noticeable. Most people reading this message board will never notice these messages. This gives Forbes the ability to censor completely legitimate posts at their whim.

If successfully commercialized (which hasn’t happened yet), LENRs indeed have the potential to eventually become a truly ‘green’ radiation- and waste-free nuclear power generation technology. In that regard, I would like to comment about some inaccuracies emanating from several outside news sources that were quoted or referenced in your otherwise concise, well-written, and very informative article.

Specifically, so that your readers will not have any lingering misapprehensions about the intrinsic safety of LENRs, I would like to clarify and beg to differ with rather loose, technically inaccurate talk about “fires,” “windows melting,” and “explosions” that has been widely promulgated by Dennis Bushnell of NASA, among others.

Firstly, all such violent energetic events are quite rare — only a handful have ever occurred over the past 20+ years during the course of literally hundreds of thousands of LENR experiments; most have involved water-filled reaction vessels of one kind or another . Secondly, and most importantly, NONE of these incidents were caused by a nuclear explosion per se. In every one of these events, an abnormally large burst of LENRs in an experimental device (such as a metal cathode in an aqueous electrolytic chemical cell) simply flash-heated some nearby materials that either melted (e.g., solid walls or windows in glass or metal reaction vessels) or expanded rapidly as the result of a heat-induced phase change (e.g., a volume of liquid water within a reaction vessel can expand violently by ~1,500 times when LENRs suddenly flash-vaporize it into superheated steam).

At this point in the technology’s evolution, heat production in LENR thermal devices is poorly controlled and also rather difficult to reliably reproduce macroscopically. Indeed, that very issue is at the heart of the experimental reproducibility problem (at least with regard to experimentally producing macroscopically measurable, very substantial amounts of excess heat) that has haunted the LENR field for over two decades. By contrast, microscopic amounts of LENR nuclear transmutation products reproduce very readily in properly designed/executed experiments and are rather easy to detect post-experiment with modern mass spectroscopy analytical techniques. Fortunately, technical insights provided by the new Widom-Larsen theory will enable the application and adaptation of key knowhow already developed in the field of nanotechnology that can solve the previously intractable problems of designing, fabricating, and operating LENR-based thermal sources that can reliably produce macroscopically large, controllable heat fluxes for long periods of time.

On Slide #53 in the following public Lattice SlideShare 78-slide PowerPoint presentation dated June 25, 2009, I list and discuss a small collection of unusually energetic thermal events that have occurred in various LENR experiments: http://www.slideshare.net/lewisglarsen/lattice-energy-llctechnical-overviewjune-25-2009

The best-measured and most completely documented experimental data on a large LENR thermal event was collected and published by Dr. Tadahiko Mizuno in Japan. On Slides #54 – 59 on the above PowerPoint presentation I ‘dissect’ Mizuno’s reported results and conclude that it was indeed a water-to-steam explosion that wrecked his apparatus. By applying the Widom-Larsen theory, I was also even able to calculate a predicted number for total heat production in his specific experiment that was in reasonable rough agreement with the value that he actually observed.

In the case of rare LENR-triggered thermal runaways in Lithium-ion batteries: again, we are NOT dealing with nuclear explosions per se. In such events, an intense microscopic LENR heat release simply superheats a tiny region of local materials inside a battery cell which in turn triggers an escalating macroscopic cascade of prosaic chemical oxidation reactions. This dynamic is akin to what happens when the sharp sound (acoustic energy) of a single gunshot can trigger a huge avalanche of snow that engulfs the entire side of a huge mountain. In this fashion, a physically large multi-cell Li-ion battery pack can potentially ‘ignite’ and be destroyed by thermal fratricide occurring between adjacent cells; see document dated July 16, 2010: http://www.slideshare.net/lewisglarsen/cfakepathlattice-energy-llc-len-rs-in-liion-battery-firesjuly-16-2010

In my opinion, loose statements by otherwise believable technologists implicitly suggesting that there may be hidden weaponization issues with LENR technology amounts to spewing of technical nonsense and grandstanding to gain public attention — nothing more.

As to astounding experimental evidence for the inherent safety and ‘greenness’ of LENR technology, one needs to look no further than catalytic converters installed on an estimated 500+ million cars and trucks worldwide. Incredibly, many papers involving analysis of emissions from catalytic converters have been published in refereed journals by environmental chemists — some of their reported isotopic data obtained via mass spectroscopy, when analyzed with the Widom-Larsen theory, strongly suggests that small amounts of LENRs are constantly occurring in car converters during normal vehicle operation. This fascinating data and its implications are discussed in the following 76-slide Lattice SlideShare presentation dated June 25, 2010: http://www.slideshare.net/lewisglarsen/lattice-energy-llc-len-rs-in-catalytic-convertersjune-25-2010

If this isn’t truly green nuclear technology, then I don’t know what is.

(Although Defkalion must not employ a health physicist, because any radiation emission rate from a shielded device must be given at a specific distance, just as sound/noise levels are specified at given distances.)

If you received that Defkalion dose for one hour, you would be approximately at the U.S. limit on effective dose from a single airport security screening. So its not insignificant.

For a variety of reasons, I don’t think that Defkalion’s purported radiation measurements on their so-called working LENR device are accurate or believable.

Since 1989, multiple national nuclear laboratories in the US and other countries — whose expertise in and analytical equipment for collecting radiation measurements were vastly superior to Defkalion’s — have conducted thousands of LENR experiments in which no biologically significant, dangerous fluxes of ‘hard’ gamma or energetic neutron radiation were ever detected.

Indeed, one of the factors that die-hard skeptics have cited in the past as a key reason for their disbelief in the reality of LENR phenomena was that no dangerous ‘hard’ radiation was ever observed experimentally, even when some detectable heat production had clearly occurred.

In our theory, heavy electrons in micron-scale LENR-active surface ‘patches’ can directly convert locally produced gamma photons into infrared radiation at very high efficiency — there is a small, highly variable emission ‘tail’ in soft X-rays. While difficult to observe, very weak emissions of such X-rays have unquestionably been detected in some LENR experiments.

Lastly, in 2011, Lattice was issued a fundamental US patent on its gamma-to-infrared conversion technology. A clean copy of the issued USPTO patent is available at Lattice’s public presence on SlideShare.

It seems clear that today Defkalion no more protect people form radiation. in some photo of Wysotskii las tsummer measuring radiation it was clear that Wysotskii was protecting the detector from ambient radiation, and not himself from the reactor.

From the Nelson test it seems clear too that testers are not protected.

It is coherent with other experiments. The organic shielding seems linked to an early specification.

If dangerous radiation was detected one day, LENR would have been admitted since long by plasma physicists.